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Naming a Collective Cause in a Foreign Land

 

‘The Politics of Naming’ was an embedded research project carried out by activists and cultural practitioners Dagmary Olívar Graterol and Paola de la Vega Velastegui in Madrid, hosted by Museo Reina Sofía. Considering the words racialised collectives in the Spanish capital use to describe their communal projects, they propose models of naming that might serve as generative tools of mediation with and through the institution. Or, as they describe how they might blur the ‘contours between instituted thought and instituting forces’.

When you are out in the open and draw on collective memory to substantiate rights or a sense of belonging, speak with our own voice as we have spoken to you, so that those who listen may know that their words are rooted in the blood of ancestors, and are the seeds of those who are no longer here.

– Abuelo Zenón, 20171

White is a political definition, which represents historical, political and social privileges of a certain group that has access to dominant structures and institutions of society.

– Grada Kilomba, 20082

If I was named Mikhail at birth, it was after one of the Communist party secretaries,
of that utopia, we have two stories, a common space: the Dominican, the political. One does not enter politics solely out of conviction, but because it affects you, because you have been harmed.

– Johan Mijail,20163

The foreign land is Madrid.4 Like many southern European cities, it is a complex space where historical narratives charged with the most conservative nationalism converge with those of past and present revolutions.5 Governed by the right, in recent years the city has been subjected to policies that promote a neoliberal model of community, along with ideals and policies that threaten the environment, as well as the city’s forms of coexistence, ways of thinking, and pre-existing diverse and dissident practices-.

In terms of current migratory flows, Spain’s geopolitical position, its proximity to the coasts of North and West Africa and the two Spanish autonomous cities in North African territory, Ceuta and Melilla, all make the country a point of entry for migrants. The sea is not the only conduit for movements from the Global South; airports are the main gateways in Spain, and cities the most frequent destinations. The Spanish capital is a meeting point, sometimes a place of transit, and also a place of residence for people of various nationalities and ethnic and affective communities who come here in search of a future. It is in this city that the cultural and anti-racist collectives and projects whose names and stories have been the driving force behind our research have evolved. Madrid is the setting for these encounters and the intellectual eddies they have created during this process.

The nascent research project ‘Políticas del nombrar’ (Politics of Naming) emerged out of a friendship, shared activism and common questions that we both represent and embody: we are both racialized women, both connected to Madrid in different ways through memory, migration, social ties and the colonial wound that we share through our other closely related work and research. For us, migrant and racialized cultural collectives in Madrid are not a subject or object of research but a shared means of activism, a way of surviving and coexisting in order to make sense of our existence in this world. The concerns that we address in this research pertain to us: they are part of us, of our cultural practices, insofar as both of us have belonged, and still belong, to cultural collectives from their outsets, and we have taken part in striving to name them, and in the political exercise that this implies. We also understand the precariousness of the cultural sector that we experience in our being and our bodies, among other factors that intersect to determine the development of a project of this kind.

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